Beyond interstellar travel, Matthew McConaughey has also traversed the globe in his international escapades. The Oscar winner revealed that he briefly left Hollywood behind for Peru after the success of his 1996 movie, A Time to Kill, when he needed a break from the glare of the spotlight.
"I needed to get my feet on solid ground," Matthew said in the May 5 episode of the No Magic Pill with Blake Mycoskie podcast. "So I hit the road. Boom! I went to Peru. I had to find it—to check the validation. I knew I had it, but I just had to go prove it again."
As a celebrity, Matthew had experienced a whirlwind of adulation, and he was trying to decipher what was real and what was just hype. "When you become famous, some salutations are skipped, and people stop asking your name or what you do," he explained.
So, Matthew embarked on a 22-day reset in Peru, where he was able to build genuine relationships with the local community who were unaware of his movie star status. "I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo. That was it," the Dallas Buyers Club actor continued. "And at the end of those 22 days, the tears in their eyes and in mine, and the hugs we shared on the bittersweet moment of saying goodbye, were all based on the man they met named Mateo—a man who had nothing to do with the celebrity or our experiences together during those 22 days."
Indeed, Matthew's time away from Hollywood had a profound healing effect on him. (And ultimately, he and his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, opted to trade Los Angeles for his native Texas as they raised their kids—Levi, 17, Vida, 15, and Livingston, 13.)
"I was now in a place long enough to say, 'I could live this. This could be my existence,'" he continued. "As soon as you go, 'I could do this,' then you're like, 'Well, I can return home.'" Plus, as he put it, "It gave me my self-identity again. It reaffirmed my own identity that 'Oh, I got it. This is based on me.'"
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